From January 30 – July 7, 2013, the upcoming Festina Lente exhibition will offer an unconventional behind-the-scenes opportunity to survey the Greek and Roman holdings in the Davis Museum’s permanent collections. Featuring vases and vessels of all sorts and designs, relief portraits and standing figures, mosaics, coins and jewelry, human and animal forms, the scope of the collection reveals tremendous vitality of form and function rendered in glass, terracotta, clay, metal, and stone.

The exhibition and programs illuminate the particular challenges facing museum antiquities collections, including questions of attribution, provenance, and authenticity; the science of investigation; changing strategies and shifting aesthetics in restoration; the function of and framework for managing fragmentary objects; the search for traces in abraded and eroded surfaces; and trends in collecting over time.

Core students are encouraged to dip their toes and visit this exhibition, as many of the works and ideas presented there will relate to, and may elaborate upon, the works studied in the Core.